Author Archive: Kevin Hazard

Building an API is a bit of a balancing act. You want your API to be simple and easy to use, and you want it to be feature-rich and completely customizable. Because those two desires happen to live on opposite ends of the spectrum, every API finds a different stasis in terms of how complex and customizable they are. The SoftLayer API was designed to provide customers with granular control of every action associated with any product or service on our platform; anything you can do in our customer portal can be done via our API. That depth of functionality might be intimidating to developers looking to dive in quickly and incorporate the SoftLayer platform into their applications, so our development team has been working to streamline and simplify some of the most common API services to make them even more accessible.

To get an idea of what their efforts look like in practice, Phil posted an SLDN blog with a perfect example of how they simplified cloud computing instance (CCI) creation via the API. The traditional CCI ordering process required developers to define nineteen data points:

While each of those data points is straightforward, you still have to define nineteen of them. You have all of those options when you check out through our shopping cart, so it makes sense that you'd have them in the API, but when it comes to ordering through the API, you don't necessarily need all of those options. Our development team observed our customers' API usage patterns, and they created the slimmed-down and efficient SoftLayer_Virtual_Guest::createObject — a method that only requires seven data points:

Hostname
Domain name
Number of cores
Amount of RAM
Hourly/monthly billing
Local vs SAN disk
Operating System

Without showing you a single line of code, you see the improvement. Default values were established for options like Port speeds and Monitoring based on customer usage patterns, and as a result, developers only have to provide half the data to place a new CCI order. Because each data point might require multiple lines of code, the volume of API code required to place an order is slimmed down even more. The best part is that if you find yourself needing to modify one of the now-default options like Port speeds or Monitoring, you still can!

As the development team finds other API services and methods that can be streamlined and simplified like this one, they'll ninja new solutions to make the API even more accessible. Have you tried coding to the SoftLayer API yet? If not, what's the biggest roadblock for you? If you're already a SLAPI coder, what other methods do you use often that could be streamlined?

Wakka wakka wakka wakka. All your base are belong to us. I'm sorry Mario, but our princess is in another castle. It's dangerous to go alone. Do a barrel roll.

If you can place any of those quotes from the video games of yore, you'll probably love the Server Challenge II. Taking cues from classic arcade games, we've teamed up with Supermicro to build a worthy sequel to our original Server Challenge:

If you come across Server Challenge II at a conference, your task is clear. You step up to the full-sized server rack and perform three simple tasks:

Load the data.

Connect the network.

Save the world.

You've got two attempts per day to install twenty-four drive trays into two 2U Supermicro servers and plug eighteen network cables into their correct switches. Get all of that done in the fastest time at the conference, and you walk away with a brand new Macbook Air. During booth setup at GDC Online, we shot a quick video of what that looks like:

The new challenge is sure to garner a lot of attention, and we're excited to see the competition heat up as the show progresses. Beyond being a fun game, the Server Challenge II is also a great visual for what SoftLayer does. When you get to touch servers in a server hosting company's booth, you're probably going to remember us the next time you need to order a new server. You also get to see the Cisco and Supermicro switches that you'd see in all of our thirteen data centers around the world ... It's a tech geek's dream come true.

In honor of the launch of Server Challenge II, we're going to offer some "live" coverage of the competition at GDC Online this week. If you want to watch the Server Challenge II GDC Online 2012 remotely via "challenge-cast," bookmark this blog post and refresh frequently. We'll update the leader board every hour or two so that you can keep track of how the times are progressing throughout the show:

Game on.

**UPDATE** GDC Online has officially wrapped, and after some last-minute heroics, Derek Manns grabbed the top spot (and the MacBook Air) for his Server Challenge II efforts! If you've been watching the leader board throughout the conference, you saw the top attendee time fall from 1:59.30 all the way down to 1:09.48. We hope you've enjoyed the "challenge-cast" ... Keep an eye on SoftLayer's event schedule to prepare for your next chance to take on the Server Challenge II.

I can't begin to tell you how much fun I have when I get to represent SoftLayer at conferences. The days may be long, and my feet may go numb by the end of the day from so much standing, but the time seems to fly as I get to meet new people, give out SoftLayer swag and introduce/explain the (in)famous SoftLayer Server Challenge.

I've observed that at most tech conferences, attendees will wander up and down the aisles, avoiding eye contact and looking preoccupied with emails or Angry Birds on their phones. When they walk by the SoftLayer booth, something changes. They stop. They pay attention. They get engaged. It's hard to passively navigate around a crowd of people cheering on a Server Challenge competitor, and if you see another attendee your peripheral vision "wowing" us with his/her three-switch-ball juggling skills, you're going to get distracted from your Angry Birds game. The SoftLayer booth is a snapshot of SoftLayer's culture, and SoftLayer's culture is magnetic.

When we catch the eye of that previously disinterested attendee, we get to tell the SoftLayer story: "Oh this? It's a small version of a SoftLayer server rack with five SuperMicro servers in it. We've got more than 100,000 servers like these in 13 data centers around the world. Want to try and race to put it back together?" "This is called a switch-ball ... SoftLayer is an infrastructure as a service provider, so it doesn't really have a direct tie-in with SoftLayer's business, but it's the coolest giveaway you'll see at the conference." Whether the attendee is interested in the competition, hosting, servers or cool swag, we've started a conversation that we might not have had if we were just shaking hands and passing out brochures.

As the conference goes on, most booths see traffic decline. That's when the Server Challenge is usually getting the most competitive. Several of our competitions have been decided by tenths or even hundredths of seconds, and a few have been won by the last competitor on the last day as the PA announcement notifies attendees that the expo hall is closing. At Cloud Connect Chicago, I recorded three competitors who each had the potential to walk away victorious:

All three of those competitors had fun in the SoftLayer booth. The other attendees who stepped up to the Server Challenge enjoyed themselves, too. That's huge. That's extremely rare. That's why I love being a part of the rag-tag group SLayers who have the opportunity to spread the word about SoftLayer.

As I put together the quick video to show the competition from Cloud Connect Chicago, I wondered how the times compared with the other shows that have featured the Server Challenge this year. My "wondering" wound up becoming "researching," and this is what I found:

NAME

SHOW

TIME

Roger Weber

GDC Europe

0:57.62

Rany Grinberg

ad:tech San Franscisco

0:58.34

Dejian Fang

Cloud Expo East

0:59.08

Darin Goldman

HostingCon

0:59.28

Joseph Waite

Internet World London

1:03.68

Scott Fossen

Cloud Connect Chicago

1:05.51

EJ Fernald

GDC San Francisco

1:06.06

Kenny Liao

Web 2.0 Expo

1:06.41

Matthew Downing

Cloud Expo Europe

1:08.16

Gary Barclay

TFM&A

1:10.08

Every conference seems to be competitive, and it's amazing to see how close the times are between all of the conference winners in 2012. Server Challenge World Championship? While I start drawing up plans to try and make that a reality, I recommend you all print out blueprints and start training for the next time you come across a SoftLayer booth at an event.

I laughed. I cried. I found it informative. I noticed a few places where it could have been better.

We recorded the video in response to a tweet from one of our Twitter followers, and the off-the-cuff dialog wound up being somewhere in between "accessible, informative and funny" and "overly detailed, too long and obviously improvised." Because there aren't many people who want to listen to two guys give a 15-minute presentation on IP addresses when they could be watching a Songified review of Five Guys Burgers and Fries or an epic data center tour, I thought I'd dilute the information from the video into a quick blog post that spells out some of the major distinctions between IPv4 and IPv6 so you can scan it, interject your own "witty" banter and have your favorite YouTube viral video playing in the background.

IP Address Overview

An IP address is like a telephone number or a street address. When you connect to the Internet, your device (computer, smartphone, tablet) is assigned an IP address, and any site you visit has an IP address. The IP addressing system we've been using since the birth of the Internet is called IPv4, and the new addressing system is called IPv6. The reason we have to supplement the IPv4 address system (and ultimately eclipse it) with IPv6 is because the Internet is running out of available IPv4 address space, and IPv6 provides is an exponentially larger pool of IP addresses ... Let's look at the numbers:

Even saying the IPv6 space is "exponentially larger" doesn't really paint the picture of the difference in size.

IPv4 Addresses

To understand why the IPv4 address space is limited to four billion addresses, we can break down an IPv4 address. An IPv4 address is a 32-bit number made up of four octets (8-bit numbers) in decimal notation, separated by periods. A bit can either be a 1 or a 0 (2 possibilities), so the decimal notation of an octet would have 28 distinct possibilities — 256 of them, to be exact. Because we start numbering at 0, the possible values of one an octet in an IPv4 address go from 0 to 255.

Examples of IPv4 Addresses: 192.168.0.1, 66.228.118.51, 173.194.33.16

If an IPv4 address is made up of four sections with 256 possibilities in each section, to find the total number of possibilities in the entire IPv4 pool, you'd just multiply 256*256*256*256 to get to the 4,294,967,296 number. To look at it another way, you've got 32 bits, so 232 will get you to the same total.

IPv6 Addresses

IPv6 addresses are based on 128 bits. Using the same math as above, we can take 2128 and find the total IPv6 address pool (which I won't copy again here because it takes up too much space). Because the IPv6 pool is so much larger than the IPv4 pool, it'd be much more difficult to define the space in the same decimal notation ... you'd have 232 possibilities in each section.

To allow for that massive IPv6 pool to be used a little more easily, IPv6 addresses are broken down into eight 16-bit sections, separated by colons. Because each section is 16 bits, it can have 216 variations (65,536 distinct possibilities). Using decimal numbers between 0 and 65,535 would still be pretty long-winded, so IPv6 addresses are expressed with hexadecimal notation (16 different characters: 0-9 and a-f).

Example of an IPv6 Addresses: 2607:f0d0:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf

That's still a mouthful, but it's a little more manageable than the decimal alternatives.

CIDR Slash (/) Notation

When people talk about blocks of IP addresses, they generally use CIDR Slash (/) Notation where the block might look like this: 192.0.2.0/24 ... When you glance at that number, you might assume, "Okay, so you have 192.0.2.0 through 192.0.2.24," but CIDR notation is not showing you the range of addresses, it's telling you the size of the "network" part of the allocation.

IP addresses are made up two parts — the network and the host. The "network" part of the address tells us the number of bits that stay the same at the beginning of the block of IPs, while the "host" part of the address are the bits that define the different possibilities of IP addresses in the block. In CIDR notation, a /24 is telling us that the first 24 bits of the address are defined by the network, so we have 8 bits (32 total bits minus 24 network bits) in the host — 28 is 256 distinct addresses. The 192.0.2.0/24 IPv4 address block includes 192.0.2.0 to 192.0.2.255.

IPv4 address blocks can be as large as a /8 (given to regional registries like ARIN and APNIC), and they can be as small as a /32 (which is a single IP address).

Why Provision So Many IPv6 Addresses?

When SoftLayer provisions an IPv6 address block on a server, we give a /64 block of IPv6 addresses ... Or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses to each server. That number seems excessive, but the /64 block size is the "smallest" IPv6 allocation block.

Providers like SoftLayer are allocated /32 blocks of IPv6 addresses. The difference between a /32 and a /64 is 32 bits (232) ... Bonus points if you can remember where you've seen that number before. What that means is that SoftLayer is given a block of IP addresses so large that we could provision 4,294,967,296 /64 blocks of IPv6 addresses ... Or put more remarkably: In one /32 block of IPv6 space, there are the same number of /64 blocks of IPv6 addresses as there are TOTAL IPv4 addresses.

So while it's pretty impossible to use a full /64 of IPv6 addresses on a server, it's equally difficult for SoftLayer to burn through its /32 block.

So Now What?

IPv4 space is running out quickly. If your site isn't running a dual-stack IPv6 configuration yet, it's possible that you're going to start missing traffic from users who are only able to access the Internet over IPv6 (which is not backwards compatible with IPv4). If your Internet Service Provider (ISP) doesn't support IPv6 yet, you won't be able to access websites that are broadcast only with IPv6 addresses.

The percentage of instances of each of those cases is relatively small, but it's only going to get larger ... And it only takes one missed customer to make you regret not taking the steps to incorporate IPv6 into your infrastructure.

SoftLayer Private Clouds are officially live, and that means you can now order and provision your very own private cloud infrastructure on Citrix CloudPlatform quickly and easily. Chief Scientist Nathan Day introduced private clouds on the blog when it was announced at Cloud Expo East, and CTO Duke Skarda followed up with an explanation of the architecture powering SoftLayer Private Clouds. The most amazing claim: You can order a private cloud infrastructure and spin up its first virtual machines in a matter of hours rather than days, weeks or months.

If you've ever looked at building your own private cloud in the past, the "days, weeks or months" timeline isn't very surprising — you have to get the hardware provisioned, the software installed and the network configured ... and it all has to work together. Hearing that SoftLayer Private Clouds can be provisioned in "hours" probably seems too good to be true to administrators who have tried building a private cloud in the past, so I thought I'd put it to the test by ordering a private cloud and documenting the experience.

At 9:30am, I walked over to Phil Jackson's desk and asked him if he would be interested in helping me out with the project. By 9:35am, I had him convinced (proof), and the clock was started.

When we started the order process, part of our work is already done for us:

To guarantee peak performance of the CloudPlatform management server, SoftLayer selected the hardware for us: A single processor quad core Xeon 5620 server with 6GB RAM, GigE, and two 2.0TB SATA II HDDs in RAID1. With the management server selected, our only task was choosing our host server and where we wanted the first zone (host server and management server) to be installed:

For our host server, we opted for a dual processor quad core Xeon 5504 with the default specs, and we decided to spin it up in DAL05. We added (and justified) a block of 16 secondary IP addresses for our first zone, and we submitted the order. The time: 9:38am.

At this point, it would be easy for us to game the system to shave off a few minutes from the provisioning process by manually approving the order we just placed (since we have access to the order queue), but we stayed true to the experiment and let it be approved as it normally would be. We didn't have to wait long:

At 9:42am, our order was approved, and the pressure was on. How long would it take before we were able to log into the CloudStack portal to create a virtual machine? I'd walked over to Phil's desk 12 minutes ago, and we still had to get two physical servers online and configured to work with each other on CloudPlatform. Luckily, the automated provisioning process took on a the brunt of that pressure.

Both server orders were sent to the data center, and the provisioning system selected two pieces of hardware that best matched what we needed. Our exact configurations weren't available, so a SBT in the data center was dispatched to make the appropriate hardware changes to meet our needs, and the automated system kicked into high gear. IP addresses were assigned to the management and host servers, and we were able to monitor each server's progress in the customer portal. The hardware was tested and prepared for OS install, and when it was ready, the base operating systems were loaded — CentOS 6 on the management server and Citrix XenServer 6 on the host server. After CentOS 6 finished provisioning on the management server, CloudStack was installed. Then we got an email:

At 11:24am, less than two hours from when I walked over to Phil's desk, we had two servers online and configured with CloudStack, and we were ready to provision our first virtual machines in our private cloud environment.

We log into CloudStack and added our first instance:

We configured our new instance in a few clicks, and we clicked "Launch VM" at 11:38am. It came online in just over 3 minutes (11:42am):

I got from "walking to Phil's desk" to having a multi-server private cloud infrastructure running a VM in exactly two hours and twelve minutes. For fun, I created a second VM on the host server, and it was provisioned in 31.7 seconds. It's safe to say that the claim that SoftLayer takes "hours" to provision a private cloud has officially been confirmed, but we thought it would be fun to add one more wrinkle to the system: What if we wanted to add another host server in a different data center?

From the "Hardware" tab in the SoftLayer portal, we selected "Add Zone" to from the "Actions" in the "Private Clouds" section, and we chose a host server with four portable IP addresses in WDC01. The zone was created, and the host server went through the same hardware provisioning process that our initial deployment went through, and our new host server was online in < 2 hours. We jumped into CloudStack, and the new zone was created with our host server ready to provision VMs in Washington, D.C.

Given how quick the instances were spinning up in the first zone, we timed a few in the second zone ... The first instance was online in about 4 minutes, and the second was running in 26.8 seconds.

By the time I went out for a late lunch at 1:30pm, we'd spun up a new private cloud infrastructure with geographically dispersed zones that launched new cloud instances in under 30 seconds. Not bad.

If 80's movies have taught me anything, it's that any good story needs to have a video montage with Journey playing in the background. With that in mind, I'll start this blog post with a glimpse of HostingCon 2012:

HostingCon brings the hosting industry together every year, and the conference winds up being surprisingly similar to classic 80's "coming of age" movies:

"Geeks" are among the main characters.

There's always a "funny guy."

At some point, the geeks attend a party.

The characters learn more about themselves and others over the course of the movie.

As the credits roll, everyone is inspired ... Ready to take on the world.

With that in mind, HostingCon 2012 in Boston was a veritable John Hughes flick. There was no shortage of geeks, we hung out with one of the funniest people in the country, we threw a massive party, and we learned a ton. Without a doubt, attendees returned home with their intensity and enthusiasm cranked up to eleven (another 80's reference).

The expo hall was abuzz with activity — albeit after a lull in the morning following the aptly named "Host Me All Night Long" party — and we enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with current partners and customers while meeting and speaking with soon-to-be partners and customers. While running a highly competitive Server Challenge, we were still able to dive deeper into partnerships, the build v. buy decision, branding, and launching a product when attendees visited our booth after hearing from our team in conference sessions and panels, and those conversations are what keep us coming back to HostingCon every year.

As a "veteran" of the hosting industry (assuming seven years of experience qualifies me), I've learned a great deal about the dynamics of the hosting industry from events like HostingCon over the years. On one hand, many of the attendees are "competitors," and on the other hand, we're all trying to make the industry better (since "a rising tide lifts all boats"). As a great example, look at the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2C), a trade association of companies with the shared goal and purpose of representing the industry in Washington, D.C., and beyond.

As it turns out, that unity flew out the door when attendees stood face-to-rack with the Server Challenge, though. Unlike our experiences at more general "technology" conferences, the components in our competition needed no introduction, and participants were particularly driven to best their peers ... not only for the iPad, but for the pride of owning the Server Challenge title at HostingCon:

Darin Goldman - 0:59.28

Devon Hillard - 1:01.58

Ijan Kruizinga - 1:01.83

Jon Basha - 1:03.02

Sean Whitley - 1:03.06

As you saw in the video, Darin Goldman had the luxury of not needing his second attempt on the final day of the conference to secure a victory, but we were glad he let us record his "Breakfast Club" fist-pump to share with the world.

The highlight of any customer visit to a SoftLayer office is always the data center tour. The infrastructure in our data centers is the hardware platform on which many of our customers build and run their entire businesses, so it's not surprising that they'd want a first-hand look at what's happening inside the DC. Without exception, visitors to a SoftLayer data center pod are impressed when they walk out of a SoftLayer data center pod ... even if they've been in dozens of similar facilities in the past.

What about the customers who aren't able to visit us, though? We can post pictures, share stats, describe our architecture and show you diagrams of our facilities, but those mediums can't replace the experience of an actual data center tour. In the interest of bridging the "data center tour" gap for customers who might not be able to visit SoftLayer in person (or who want to show off their infrastructure), we decided to record a video data center tour.

If you've seen "professional" video data center tours in the past, you're probably positioning a pillow on top of your keyboard right now to protect your face if you fall asleep from boredom when you hear another baritone narrator voiceover and see CAD mock-ups of another "enterprise class" facility. Don't worry ... That's not how we roll:

Josh Daley — whose role as site manager of DAL05 made him the ideal tour guide — did a fantastic job, and I'm looking forward to feedback from our customers about whether this data center tour style is helpful and/or entertaining.

If you want to see more videos like this one, "Like" it, leave comments with ideas and questions, and share it wherever you share things (Facebook, Twitter, your refrigerator, etc.).

It's that time of year again ... HostingCon is upon us, and we're faced with an interesting challenge: Go even bigger and badder in Boston than we did at HostingCon 2011 in San Diego. And that's a tall order.

Given the fact that we've already sponsored and participated in dozens of conferences around the world this year, you might be surprised to learn that we've still got a surprises in our bag of tricks. Without giving too much away, I thought I'd share a few of the SoftLayer-specific highlights you make note of if you're planning your HostingCon itinerary.

Conference Sessions

Want some hosting insight from the executive management team of one of the largest privately held hosting providers in the world? You might want to add these sessions to your calendar:

As more "non-traditional" hosters (telcos, cable companies & VARs) enter the cloud services market finding the right partner is a must. The opportunity is huge but this isn’t a situation where a rising tide will float all boats. Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer will explain how, in order to be successful, you’ll need to understand the following: 1) Building for Internet Scale, 2) Think platform first, and 3) How to automate. The session will include discussion of how SoftLayer leverages partners to drive business growth.

The finance, operations and administrative back office of a hosting company can be a complex animal. Some hosts have dedicated software development teams to build in-house solutions, others opt to buy as much as they can from 3rd party vendors. Hear three different approaches to tackling the problem, and learn how your product line can determine the optimal mix of open source, home grown and off-the-shelf solutions.

In a crowded marketplace it's critical to establish a clear position and identity in the minds of your customers and prospects. SoftLayer CMO Simon West will discuss best practices for defining and articulating your brand position, illustrating with specific examples drawn from his experience in building some of the industry's most notable brands.

Introducing value-added services around basic hosting can be the strategy that turns a hosting business into a winning venture for the host, and a truly valuable service for the customer. In this interactive session, a panel of product management experts from the hosting business will cover best practices for building (or integrating), launching and selling a new product to your customers, helping you to develop processes, procedures and strategies for seeing a new product launch through from start to finish.

The SoftLayer Booth: #413

When you step into the expo hall at the John B. Hynes Convention Center, you're going to see SoftLayer. In our 20' x 30' space at booth 413, we'll have a few of your favorite SLayers available to answer any and all of your questions about what's new and what's next for SoftLayer ... And to pass out some always-popular SoftLayer swag.

By popular demand, the Server Challenge will be making its return to HostingCon, and if last year is any indication, the competition will be fierce. The pride of besting all HostingCon attendees in reassembling a server rack is arguably as valuable as the New iPad the winner receives. Though your pride doesn't have a Retina Display.

Host Me All Night Long

Following the phenomenal success of "Geeks Gone Wild" last year (headlined by The Dan Band), we knew we had our work cut out for us when it came to planning a party for HostingCon in Boston. We've teamed up with cPanel and comcure to put together "Host Me All Night Long" at Royale Boston on Monday, July 16.

One of my favorite comedians, Ralphie May, is going hit the stage at 8pm, and you won't want to miss a second of his set. Following Ralphie, Yellow Brick Road is bringing their award-winning Classic Rock tribute skills from Las Vegas to keep the night going. Given the name of the party, you shouldn't be surprised when a little AC/DC "You Shook Me All Night Long" is played.

Like last year, the attendance is strictly limited, and when the number of tickets available at http://hostingconparty.com/ reaches zero, you're out of luck. Even if you're our best customer ever, you need a ticket to get in the door, so register while you can! If you show a little extra SoftLayer love on Twitter or Facebook, send me a link to it (khazard@softlayer.com), and I might be able to hook you up with a VIP code to get you priority access and into the VIP section at the venue.

Chris Gardner (of The Pursuit of Happyness fame) said, "Find something that you love. Something that gets you so excited you can't wait to get out of bed in the morning. Forget about money. Be happy." Now I can't honestly tell you I'm able to "forget about money" or that I'm much of a morning person, but I'm quick to tell people that I love what I do. If you click through a few of the "Culture" posts on this blog, you'll read that I'm not alone. This week, I realized how many non-work interests SoftLayer plays a role in.

Beyond my closet-full of black and red shirts (many of which are visible in Tech Partner Spotlight video interviews on YouTube), even when I'm out of the office I find myself "checking on customers' servers" quite a bit ... I use quotes in there because that the justification I give myself for spending time (that I'd probably spend anyway) on platforms that leverage SoftLayer's infrastructure.

Because SoftLayer operates with an "Innovate or Die" mentality, we tend to attract customers that innovate in their own businesses. Whether that trend is intentional or not, it makes sense: Why would a fast-moving platform or application with massive growth and scaling needs be hosted with a provider taking "enterprise" time to provision a solution that ends up being "enterprise" only in name? "Enterprise Class" is not the same as "Internet Scale," and that distinction is pretty significant when a business might have one visitor on Monday and a million visitors on Tuesday. Platforms and applications that grow like that usually operate with a high level of what I like to call "awesomeness," so when they choose SoftLayer as a hosting provider, I feel like I need to investigate their awesomeness personally ... And that's how I've become a die-hard user of many of SoftLayer's customers.

One of my favorite customers to "check on" is Tumblr. If you aren't familiar with Tumblr, I recommend that you go to their site right now and immerse yourself in their community. I actually remember the day Tumblr signed on as a customer; I was genuinely excited that they'd be hosting on our platform. Even if that excitement was because I could justify having my Tumblr dashboard open in the background at work. I don't think anyone could have expected the platform to grow so phenomenally in a few years, but Tumblr's numbers are pretty staggering these days: 16.7 billion (yes, with a "B") monthly pageviews of 55.7 million blogs with 23.1 billion posts. I wasn't one of the first accounts on Tumblr, but I tell myself I have some kind of Tumblr cred ... And I use my "limited-edition" black background and Japanese dashboard logo to prove it:

Another SoftLayer customer who's gotten a lot of press over the past month or two is OMGPOP. OMGPOP scaled "Draw Something" to tens of millions of users on SoftLayer's infrastructure (which you probably know), but what you probably didn't know is that as "Draw Something" started growing in the market, it was also spreading virally in our office. You'd be amazed at how many SLayers caught the bug. Here's one of Steve Kinman's works of art from a recent game:

While Tumblr and OMGPOP manage to snag a good amount of my free time, my most recent obsession has been playing NomNom Combo from Eastside Game Studios. I had a chance to meet a few of the guys from Eastside Games at GDC this year, and George Karidis told me that I should download NomNom Combo to check it out before I went to the launch party we sponsored for them in San Francisco. As it turns out, he created a monster ... By the time the party rolled around, I had to tear myself away from strategizing the best way to move up the game's all-time "Top Score" leader board. Two months later, I can say that all of my efforts have been validated:

I guess if I had to make a long story short, if you have an addictive app or game that you want to move to the SoftLayer platform, it would be brilliant move from a growth and scaling perspective. One request I'd have is that you warn me, though. I want to have time to bury my head in the sand so I don't get hooked on more SoftLayer-powered goodness ... I'm running out of "free time."

In the first post of this series, we talked about the three key deciding factors every cloud customer has to consider, and we set up a Venn diagram to distinguish the surprisingly broad range of unique priorities customers can have:

Because every customer will prioritize a cloud's cost, technology and hosting provider a little differently (for completely valid reasons), we mapped out seven distinct "zones" to differentiate some of the basic market segments, or "personas," of cloud hosting buyers. That post was intended to set the stage for a larger discussion on how customers choose their cloud providers and how cloud providers choose their customers, and we're just scratching the surface. We're tackling a pretty big topic here, so as Bill Cosby famously says, "I told you that story to tell you this one."

As a hosting provider, SoftLayer can't expect to be all things for all people. It's impossible to offer a quad-core hex-proc dedicated server for a price that will appeal to a customer in the market for a $49/mo dedicated server.

To better illustrate SoftLayer's vision in the cloud market, we need to take that generic cost v. technology v. hosting provider diagram and give it the "Three Bars" treatment:

We're much more interested in living and breathing the Zone 5 "Technology" space rather than the traditional Zone 2 "Hosting Provider" space. That's why in the past two months, you've seen announcements about our launch of the latest Intel Processors, HPC computing with NVidia GPUs, searchable OpenStack Object Storage, and an innovative "Flex Image" approach to bluring the lines between physical and virtual servers. We choose to pursue the cloud customers who make their buying decisions in Zone 3.

That's a challenging pursuit ... It's expensive to push the envelope in technology, customers primarily interested in technology/performance have demanding needs and expectations, and it's easier to make mistakes when you're breaking new ground. The majority of the hosting industry seems to have an eye on the buyer in Zone 1 because they believe the average hosting customer is only interested in the bottom line ... That hosting is more or less a commodity, so the focus should be on some unverifiable qualitative measure of support or the next big special that'll bring in new orders.

As you may have seen recently, GigaOm posted a lovely article that references several high-profile companies in our 25,000+ customer family. We like to say that SoftLayer builds the platform on which our customers build the future, and that short post speaks volumes about the validity of that statement. Our goal is to provide the most powerful, scalable and seamlessly integrated IT infrastructure for the most innovative companies in the world. Innovate or Die isn't just our company motto ... It's our hope for our customers, as well.

We might miss out on your business if you want a $49/mo dedicated server, but if you're looking to change the world, we've got you covered. :-)